Generally described, computing devices may convey items of digital content to users. For example, computing devices may visually convey items of content such as images, electronic books, electronic periodicals, movies, television programs, multi-media content, and portions thereof on an electronic screen or touchscreen. Computing devices may also direct output through headphones or speakers to convey items of audible content such as audiobooks, songs, movies, television programs, multi-media content, and portions thereof.
In some instances, it may desirable to determine how well a user of an item of content understands certain aspects of the content. For example, a teacher or parent may wish to determine how well his or her students or children understand an electronic book or audiobook. In current approaches, manually generated and distributed questions are used for testing content comprehension by presenting these questions to a user of the item of content. These questions may be collected into banks or pools. In some approaches, heuristics are programmed to select questions from the question banks and adapt to a user's responses to the questions. For example, a user that answers many questions correctly may be given more difficult questions from the question bank.
One limitation of current approaches is that the process of manually generating questions can be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. For example, someone wishing to generate questions manually about an item of content typically consumes the item of content and then writes questions about the content. Moreover, approaches that rely on pre-generated questions often cannot be tailored to the goals of an individual user of the item of content. For example, a user may need assistance in improving one reading skill, but may be strong in other reading skills. A question bank that only has a few questions directed to the reading skill that needs improvement may prove inadequate to help the user improve that reading skill. Additionally, a user may exhaust all of the questions in a question bank. These limitations and others are not merely limited to educational environments, but may apply generally in all contexts in which questions may be conveyed about content.